<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Scarlet Carsons by Ladybug_21</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27398014">Scarlet Carsons</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21'>Ladybug_21</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>V for Vendetta (2005)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Gen, Roses, Trauma</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 20:41:52</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,600</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27398014</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>"Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have.  It is the very last inch of us.  But within that inch, we are free."</em>
</p><p>Valerie did not survive the reign of Norsefire. At first, in a sense, neither did Ruth.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Valerie Page/Ruth</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Scarlet Carsons</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I own no rights to this film, nor to the graphic novels that inspired it. Happy Guy Fawkes Day, all.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Ruth survived.</p><p>In a sense, that is.  She was one of the few whose bodies somehow withstood the torture and the starvation and the experiments and the bouts of wracking illness.  When they formally closed the prison camp where she had been slowly hollowed out into a shell resembling a human being, they left her and the handful of other living prisoners freezing in a ditch, confident that it would be pointless to even waste the ammunition needed to execute them.  One final gesture of heartlessness, she assumed, leaving them to die in the cold rather than put them out of their misery.</p><p>Ruth had shut her eyes, waiting for death to envelop her like an embrace.  Instead, Valerie's face blazed across the insides of her eyelids, infusing her with the burning desire to live.  And so, once her doomed fellows had stopped moving, she stripped them of their threadbare clothes with trembling, guilty fingers, wrapped herself in what protection she could, and began to drag herself along the ditch, inch by agonizing inch.</p><p>According to the meticulous records kept by Sutler's minions, Ruth was dead.  In this official presumption lay her safety.  She found refuge under the hay in the barn of a weather-tempered old farmer and his wife, whose quiet resentment reminded her of what she had learnt of the French Résistance collaborators during the Vichy era (before the official narratives changed, and the teachers were forced to explain to their students that perhaps Pétain hadn't been so misguided, after all).  Her body still drew breath, and its open sores and bruises and lacerations gradually healed, but she would never fully recover.  Still, as she wolfed down the meagre meals that her hosts slipped her, she swore that she would live.  <em>Valerie, Valerie, Valerie</em>, she chanted silently, as a talisman, as a promise; and she fell asleep imagining the aroma of the fiery roses in their window box.</p><p>For surely it was <em>possible</em> that they both might have survived?  Once sufficiently recovered, she abandoned her old name, denied her old identity, remade herself into someone unremarkable and uncontroversial and utterly alien.  Even if she might never see Valerie again—even if those three unapologetic years of Scarlet Carsons and quiet Sunday morning breakfasts and holding hands would never return—she had to <em>hope</em> that Valerie had undergone a similar transformation to her own, that she still lived somewhere and somehow.</p><p>(Even if she sometimes buried her face in her pillow at night and tried not to scream over how much she had lost, over what a tremendous lie she was living.  Her body indisputably had survived Sutler's prison camps.  But most nights, she felt that her integrity—her very soul, the essence of what it meant to be Ruth, who had loved Valerie without shame or fear—had been utterly destroyed.  And with that gone, she was not sure if it really mattered that she had escaped physical destruction; the core of who she was no longer existed, anyway.)</p><p>The old Ruth had read anti-fascist treatises aloud at increasingly clandestine speakeasies, nudged Valerie to attend the occasional protest with her, kissed Valerie in full view of the world to prove that she was not afraid.  The woman who was no longer Ruth saw the masked man on television and averted her eyes.  Fearlessness was easier with someone to be brave for.  Fearlessness was easier without knowing the full, horrifying, unbelievable extent of what they could do.  She had survived for Valerie, but as her hope waned that there was a Valerie to live for, she, less-Ruth, ruthlessly had suppressed every last memory of those three years of sunshine and roses.  When the masked man's broadcast and his dangerous, thrilling words threatened to wrench those memories from the hard-packed graves where she had buried them, she fled.  And she kept her head down over the year that the mutterings grew more and more audible, and the stirrings of resistance crackled through the streets, and the Fingermen grew increasingly on-edge and increasingly trigger-happy and increasingly brutal.  She pretended that she would be safe, if only she could keep looking away.</p><p>But it is rather hard to ignore the literal explosion of the iconic seat of one's government.  She watched the footage, eyes fixed on the screens as one with the rest of the spellbound nation.  For an insane moment, she could have sworn that she saw Valerie's face, unmasked within the sea of black capes and Guy Fawkes smirks, witnessing Parliament ablaze.</p><p>In the days that followed, the uncertainty was almost unbearable.  Words like 'freedom' and 'democracy' blared across the crowds that rampaged through the streets, rejoicing, brawling, shouting—seemingly having forgotten that some of the world's worst authoritarians had been elected through technically free, democratic means.  She wearily let it all rush past her, content to wait out the tension in obscurity, until some better or worse government had been installed.  But then she heard that they (whoever 'they' were, these days) had opened the official records, and the hopes and fears that she had tried so hard to exile worked their way slowly back up to the surface.  Before long, she found herself waiting in the unending line, then hours later asking for the files for Valerie Page.</p><p>Against all odds, Ruth had somehow survived—only to learn that Valerie had not.</p><p>At first, she refused to believe it.  Perhaps there had been a clerical error, as there had been in her own situation.  But the record was too detailed: found dead in Cell IV of Larkhill Resettlement Camp at 02:13 on a cold Tuesday night, medical experiments clearly unsuccessful given the low levels of white blood cell count taken from a posthumous sample of blood, bleeding lesions noted on subject's face and back, body disposed of in a mass grave onsite.  She had thought that every inch of her own humanity had been stripped away by what had happened to her.  Somehow, though, enough of her soul still existed to go numb with shock at having the worst confirmed.  She handed the file back with a nod of thanks and slowly made her way home without taking any note of the world around her—not of the red Vs spray-painted across the old Norsefire slogan posters, nor of the slowly intensifying drizzle, nor of the gaunt-faced woman who quietly trailed her through the streets.</p><p>Several hours later, in the pitch-black of a November evening, she was awoken from an uneasy sleep by a polite knock at her door.  Dazed, she sat up on her sofa, listening to the downpour outside, then got up and opened the door a crack.</p><p>"Are you Ruth?" asked the intense young woman standing there.</p><p>"No," she replied, believing herself, and she tried to shut the young woman out before she could identify her or abuse her or hurt her.</p><p>But the young woman held up a flower pot containing a bright red rose, and Ruth stopped, staring.</p><p>"This is for you," the young woman said.  "From a friend of mine."</p><p>With a creak, the door opened a fraction of an inch.</p><p>"A Scarlet Carson," whispered Ruth.</p><p>She had smelled their scent so often in her dreams, in those days when the promise of Valerie and roses was all that she lived for, that she almost wondered if this was yet another dream, if she was still asleep on her sagging sofa with her arms wrapped around a pillow for some small degree of comfort.  But the young woman pushed the pot forward, and when Ruth cupped her hands around the terra cotta, it was solid and cool to the touch and slightly damp, and the rose's petals tickled her nose when she brought them to her face.</p><p>"Please," she said finally, "tell your friend thank you."</p><p>The young woman's eyes glinted with something like sadness, but she nodded.  As she turned on the landing to head back down the stairwell, Ruth added, "Do you need an umbrella?  To stay dry outside."</p><p>The young woman paused, her bemused smile visible in quarter profile.</p><p>"God is in the rain," she reminded Ruth.</p><p>"Who are you?" Ruth demanded in a hushed voice, when she could finally speak again.</p><p>"Only a messenger."  The young woman finally turned to face Ruth again.  "She died defiant, you know.  They tried to take everything from her, but she never relinquished the truth of who she was.  She would want the same for you.  The Fifth of November was so you could remember her without shame or fear."</p><p>A tear dripped onto one of the scarlet rose petals, where it merged into a raindrop and then slid down towards the stigma and out of sight.</p><p>"My name is Ruth," Ruth said, for the first time in years.  Her own name felt strange on her tongue, but she reclaimed it with the heady fragrance of Scarlet Carsons bolstering her courage—present and comforting as Valerie's smile, bold and vivacious as Valerie's laugh, elegant and unyielding as Valerie's resolve.</p><p>The young woman smiled and disappeared into the stormy night.</p><p>Ruth had once excelled at stoking a fire of beauty and thorns in her window box, so she placed the flower pot on her window sill and admired the rose's glow.  She swore to Valerie's memory that this, their last precious rose, would grow and flourish through every setback and each uncertainty, even to Ruth's very last inch.  And the next day, Ruth carefully watered her Scarlet Carson, then went outside to join the crowds demanding justice, her head held defiantly high.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>